Does 'United 93' Cause Brain Damage?

So while I was in Portland I bought a Wall Street Journal to read over breakfast, and I discovered what I always discover when I read the WSJ: no matter how bad you think the editorial pages are, the reality is always worse.

This time, the lesson came in the form of an astonishingly stupid column by Daniel Henninger about the Moussaoui verdict and United 93:

Need an antidote to the Moussaoui verdict? Go out this weekend to see "United 93."

Um...okay. So from the first paragraph we know this is someone who a) is actually upset about the Moussaoui verdict, b) assumes a lot of other people feel the same, and c) suggests they watch United 93 to restore their morale. Take a moment to try to wrap your brain around that. I'll wait.

You couldn't do it? Neither could I.

This is where the column goes sharply downhill:

Zacarias Moussaoui is lucky the jurors at his sentencing trial weren't allowed to see the movie "United 93" the day before reaching a verdict. If they had, rather than handing him life in prison, it is likely that one or more of the jurors would have come out of the box to deliver the death sentence himself--just as the four doomed men on Flight 93 charged their hijackers to stop its fanatic pilots from flying the airliner into another American building.

Because crazed bloodlust is the cornerstone of American jurisprudence. Because a jury that doesn't act as a lynch mob (literally) isn't doing its job. Because if they jury had torn Moussaoui to pieces with their bare hands in the courtroom, they'd have prevented an horrific atrocity just like those people on United 93.

The atrocity, I guess, being the verdict. He really doesn't like that verdict:

Some will say the Moussaoui life sentence merely proves that we in the U.S. are beyond biblical justice, beyond an eye for an eye, even if our Islamic enemies do not bother to claim any grievance larger than resentment to justify the most startling slaughter of innocents all over the world. This argument--that the refusal to impose the death penalty on Moussaoui shows "we are not like them"--might have been entertainable before September 11. It may no longer be.

Huh? So after 9/11, refusing to impose the death penalty no longer makes us unlike the terrorists? Maybe, maybe not? Does he say anything at all in this paragraph?

In this week of the Moussaoui life sentence, it is pertinent to ask whether the days and seasons we've traveled from the time of September 11 have returned the people of America to a routine that feels more normal than perhaps it should. Our sense of normalcy may not be in our best interest.

As an example....It is unlikely that in the first six months after September 11 Sen. Arlen Specter would ever have thought to intone that the wiretapping program was "in flat violation" of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But he does now.

Now here's what I don't get: what I don't get is how the legal status of Bush's wiretapping could possibly have changed between the immediate post-9/11 period and today. Was there some magical effect of 9/11 that made it not illegal for 6 months? I mean, really: it's either legal or it isn't, and if it isn't legal now it wasn't legal then, and nothing short of a judge's ruling or amendment by Congress could change it.

Not to mention the Moussaoui trial itself. We arrive at the end of these interminable trial circuses of procedural delay and then claim "the system works" and "justice" has been done. No, it has done damage to the normal idea of justice. He saw the game early on and made a mockery of it. Moussaoui achieved a two-year delay in his trial by demanding to interview al Qaeda detainees. But our moral betters insist that the whole lot of Guantanamo detainees be given access to this same system of justice. They would diminish and crush it.

Somebody who was paying attention might well conclude that the Moussaoui trial was a 'circus' largely because of the prosecutors' attempts to circumvent the established rules. That, of course, would be someone who hadn't just watched United 93.

The odds were strong, as Moussaoui's lawyers knew and the government's should have known, that 9 of 12 jurors would vote that Moussaoui's childhood was "dysfunctional" and "mitigating." This is the therapeutic vocabulary that the West has developed to explain anything in the years from the postwar period to, say, September 11.

What's missing from his comments about the case? You got it: any discussion, any mention at all, of the merits of the government's case. Nothing about Moussaoui's delusions of grandeur and the tenuous evidence that he knew anything at all. Nothing about the government's failure to show they would have prevented anything if they had all the information. There's nothing about any of that because to Henninger, the merits of the case are irrelevant. The important thing is vengeance. The important thing is killing somebody.

For quite awhile after September 11, we were a people united in the war on terror. By now we have let the adrenal pleasures of political fighting over the presidency dissipate the difficult emotions of staying united against a real enemy. The war in Iraq has contributed, but you can't lay it all off on Iraq. The ambiguity of the Moussaoui jury is a portent. See "United 93." It is very difficult. It should be. [emphasis added]

Which, of course, has it exactly backwards: hating the enemy is the real 'adrenal pleasure'; ambiguity, restraint, holding ourselves (and the government that represents us) accountable--those are the really difficult things.

And this completes Henninger's absolute inversion of morality. Lynching is justice, due process is injustice. Hysterical hatred is laudable, rational consideration is lamentable. Succumbing to bloodlust is civilized, restraint is barbaric. The law should bend to the emotions of the moment, not act as a check against their excesses.

It's the whole post-9/11 mentality in a nutshell. People like Henninger so loved the rush of being under attack that they have done everything possible to prolong it; they turned off their critical faculties at the time and it felt so good they never bothered to turn them on again. That's why they find it so threatening to see rationality return to America.

Update: No More Mr. Nice Blog points out that while they may not have watched the movie before deliberating, the jurors did listen to the tapes. In other words, Henninger is even dumber than I gave him discredit for.

[That's all, folks]